Many mysteries are plot driven with slightly hollow characters that exist simply to fuel the drive. Others enjoy a well-defined detective or similar protagonist or maybe even a fully sketched setting that takes center stage forcing all other components of the text into the parts of bit actors. But the best mysteries, the ones that a reader might pick up again and again even after they know the outcome, are those that boast it all - compelling plot, fully realized protagonist, vivid landscape, and well-defined supporting characters. Agatha Christie achieved iconic status for this level of accomplishment. I consumed her books ravenously as a younger person, and feel strongly that her strengths as a mystery writer are shared by Alan Bradley except with a fresh and amusing touch of snark supplied by 11-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce.
For those of you that read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the return of the intrepid Flavia will be most welcome. For those of you that missed her the first time around, feel free to jump immediately into round two. All will be explained. The second book in the series, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, sees a master puppeteer of some fame break down in Bishop's Lacey only to meet his end by electrocution while he stages a production of Jack and the Beanstalk for the locals in the parish hall. Flavia's bicycle Gladys transports her all over the countryside as she attempts to find the murderer and stumbles upon the truth of a death from the past.
The possible suspects include a madwoman in Gibbet Wood, a German former prisoner of war obsessed with the Bronte sisters and all things English, the vicar's pinch-faced wife, another madwoman in a dovecote, the pregnant girlfriend of the deceased, and the list of colorful and oddly charming characters and possible perps goes on from there. Flavia's family is also delightfully eccentric, and defines the young, motherless detective through sisterly tortures, a shared sadness from the loss of the family's mother and a reminder through their interactions with Flavia that our hero is but an 11-year-old no matter how precocious.
So ... 1950s English countryside, ancestral home in a slight state of decay and equipped with full scale chemistry lab at the disposal of the youngest daughter Flavia, said young lady somewhat obsessed with the possibilities of poisons. Flavia freely roams and will resort to any measures to reach her goals. She lies frequently and effortlessly, she is guilty of multiple instances of breaking and entering, and she successfully outmaneuvers the local police in quite a few instances. A rule breaker in every instance. And I highly recommend her to mystery lovers who find these notions amusing, and enjoy the Flavia-isms shared below. I found this second novel in the series just as satisfying as the first.
"It is a simple fact of nature that while most men can walk right past a weeping woman as if their eyes are blinkered and their ears stopped up with sand, no female can ever hear the sound of another in distress without rushing instantly to her aid."
"I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I don't give a frog's fundament for them when they come from an adult. It has been my experience that facetiousness in the mouth of someone old enough to know better is often no more than camouflage for something far, far worse."
"Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like "boof-boof" - just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we're still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we're invisible - except when we choose not to be."
"I had no more intention of making tea than of signing on as a coal pit monkey."
"There's something about pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind."
"Experience had taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth."
"Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger - even miles away - has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it "woman's intuition."